Feeling old in a new year

I awoke last Saturday morning to tiny footsteps in the bedroom and, before I could think to be angry, the tinkling waltz of a music box and Amalya's equally tinkling voice: "Mom told me to wake you."

It was raining as we drove to the service, which was held, as my adult cousin Nancy put it, "in a space we share with a church." Translated: a church. The big cross had a sheet hung in front of it, but for the most part the place was exploding with Episcopalian. We filed into the wooden pews, prayer books in hand, me resisting my religion major's indescribably blasphemous temptation to flip through the New Testament in the shelf in front of me.

A children's program was being held in the basement, but Amalya, only six, insisted on coming to the adults' service. She sat next to me, and I held her hand; I put my arm around her shoulder, pointed to the text when we read aloud and scratched her back when things were slow. She fell asleep with her head on my shoulder and whistled a soft snore through her cold.

As she slumbered at my side, wrapped in her father's suit coat, I tried to focus on the service, but I had trouble — mainly because it was terrible. Seeing a guitar in synagogue always makes me nauseous, and the cantor was perpetually off-key. The shoddy service revved up my nostalgic impulse; before I knew it, I was thinking of my own family, at home in Chicago, together. Tears welled in my eyes and I found myself resisting that pre-weeping shudder that I knew would wake my cousin. I looked down at her: six years old, asleep in synagogue on the shoulder of her twenty-year-old cousin whom she longed to impress, wrapped in the jacket of her father who could do no wrong, beyond oblivious to the fact that all I wanted was to be at home, with my head on my own father's shoulder, wrapped in his tallis and holding his hand.

That afternoon, as I sat in the kitchen with Nancy during a rare moment of pre-dinner respite, she told me how amazed she was that Amalya had managed to sit through the hours of services. "But," she said, "obviously it was because you were there. You know, she talks about you and your siblings all the time. If I sent you all the pictures she draws for you guys," she continued, holding her hands a foot apart, "you'd have a stack this thick."

To hear this about a cousin I see perhaps three times a year was somewhat bewildering. I realized, though, that I have never really been the younger: I am the oldest sibling with no first cousins; I never had a camp counselor or even a friend's older sister with whom I really connected. The closest I ever got (and I admit this reluctantly) were the relationships I invariably formed with my lower school educators, including — but not limited to — ice cream cones and Scrabble with my first grade teacher.

Perhaps it is never having looked up to someone that made it quite so startling to look down. I felt, last Saturday, as acutely as ever in these past few months, the surprisingly heavy weight of being an older-than. I'm sure I will never become comfortable with my own aging. Perhaps, if I am lucky, I will come to terms with it. And though I may be perpetually surprised with the speed of its progression, and its unconquerable novelty, never again will I feel surprised at its very existence as a facet of my life.

It seemed that I spent the entire summer discussing with my friends the phenomenon of being a twenty-something, the imminence of "real life" and the ungraspable closeness and distance of our childhood memories. And when I returned to school, junior year hit me with a smack to the face. This, too, took over conversation: that my friends and I didn't recognize anyone nor cared to; that graduation was a moment away, closer than that first freshman week an instant ago; and that yes, this year will be as much work as everyone promised.

Last Saturday was Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year — my first in a new decade, marking another year miles away from that quickly-disintegrating notion of home. Looking down at Amalya, I realized that I had nothing to offer her except my own empty self-assurance, a dilettante's adulthood. But I pulled her father's coat to her chin, and held her tight; because she was still only six, and to her sleeping eyes, at least, I was simply the big girl.